Hi folks. Comments may be down for a short period. One of the cross beams has gone out askew on the treadle.

The key question is whether new Arab leadership will be more open and democratic that the extremely corrupt long term dictators they replace. Still, that’s no reason to hang on to Sepp Blatter.

I have a brand new shiny blog but can I fly it? I’ll never get over Macho Grande. Infinite thanks to Tim Ireland for the extraordinary amount of work involved in getting this blog moved over from Movable Type to WordPress. Not to mention cleaning out over 300,000 pieces of spam. Transferring the 57,000 (yes, [...]

You may have noticed the sudden disappearance of every comment on the site. This is part of the IntenseDebate installation, and perfectly normal. In fact, the IntenseDebate installation is why he had to be so certain that the bulk of comments were imported to WordPress correctly (because they then had to be processed by this [...]

Hi folks. Tim here, with a quick notice about the visual changes to the site that cannot have escaped your attention. The data from the old site has now been cleansed of spam and successfully transmogrified to WordPress format. The WordPress format is now live site-wide, and all old pages should redirect to the new [...]

Some heavy lifting in progress. Any comments submitted during this manoeuvre may be lost forever in the ether.

Someone has written me a letter about Bilderberg http://thetruthserumblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/open-letter-to-craig-murray-and-michael.html My own view is that those who get overly worried about rich and powerful people meeting to forward their common interest, need to chill out. Of course they do that. It’s just like Davos with added cachet from the thrill of being “secret”. If it were [...]

For anybody inclined to be sympathetic to BP over the Gulf oil link, note that its latest capping effort is capturing about 10,000 barrels of oil a day, estimated to be about half of what is leaking. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/jun/06/bp-oil-spill-chief-executive But note that for months, BP claimed the total leak was only 5,000 barrels a day and [...]

As usual, where Craig Murray treads, the rest of Europe follows in time. Of last year’s Eurovision song contest I blogged: Last night I voted for Azerbaijan because I thought the girl was seriously hot. http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/eurovision.html Tonight I expect the rest of Europe will catch on. UPDATE In the end I voted for Armenia, as [...]

There are serious doubts about the liberal credentials of Obama’s supreme court nominee, Elena Kagan. Some excellent analysis here: http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/05/10/kagan/index.html http://jonathanturley.org/2010/05/10/obama-to-nominate-elena-kagan/

The economic crisis in Greece has many ironies, one of which is that an appalling fiscal mess, left by a very right wing government, is the responsibility of a left wing government to clear up. It is the same Augean task (to stick with Greek cultural heritage) as will face whoever takes over from this [...]

I am in Glasgow, having a very pleasant time, but it would be superhuman of me not to point out that I was right and the closure of UK airspace was indeed a weird fearmongering over-reaction. There is no diminution in ash currently in UK airspace, but its danger to aircraft has now been “reassessed”, [...]

There is a danger that the stage has been reached when we automatically disbelieve the government when it warns of a great danger. I believe, for example, that climate change is a great danger. Quite a lot of my friends, however, are dubious partly because the government is pushing it. Consider the really major government [...]

Obama and Medvedev’s signature of an new START treaty is a real achievement and should not be ridiculed. It will significantly reduce the number of nuclear warheads and guidance systems in the world. That is a good thing. Obama’s aspiration for a nuclear weapon free world is also a good thing. Of course it does [...]

I thought that was a pretty stomping article for the Guadian CiF, in response to Matt Seaton’s invitation to me to write for them again. However I don’t quite see how anybody is going to read it. Not only is there no mention of its existence on the Guardian homepage, there is not even any [...]

A while ago a friend asked me why the western media ignored the Naxalite rebellion. I confess I looked at them in some bemusement. They gave me a quick briefing and I went to read more. Yesterday the Naxalites killed 74 Indian para-military forces in a huge gun battle in Chatisgarrh, bringing to over 200 [...]

For all those commenters who were shocked by my failure to be very sorry about the murder of Eugene Terre Blanche, here is a photo of him And here’s a massacre by those nice cuddly white South Africans – less than 1% of whom engaged in any form of protest against this massacre.

My last, flippant post on the death of Eugene Terre Blanche brought an interesting comment thread, in which not only did we attract some new South African commentators, we started up interesting disagreements along unusual fault lines between regular commentators. So I thought I might probe further with something less flippant. I am not actually [...]

For all those nutters who cry “Conspiracy theory” whenever it is stated that the CIA have ever done anything wrong, here is a story from that impeccably conservative source, the Daily Telegraph: A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US [...]

Tony Baldry MP has set libel lawyers Olswang on British bloggers who have had the temerity to refer to this extremely interesting article from Sahara Reporters http://www.saharareporters.com/real-news/hot-topic/4594-nlf-decries-british-mp-tony-baldry-interference-in-iboris-case-in-london-.html Olswang state that Baldry has been hired as a QC to defend the truly horrible James Ibori on charges of money laundering. Ibori was Governor of Delta State [...]